Pakistani Literature That Refuses to Pigeonhole Its Setting

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Both Mahreen Sohail and Dur e Aziz Amna’s work reflects a turning point in Pakistani literature: a move toward portraying lives as they are, unburdened by Pakistan as an ontological subject. Together, they represent a new guard of writers probing ambition, morality, and selfhood with nuance and precision. Sohail’s debut novel, Small Scale Sinners, is a kaleidoscopic story collection that interrogates what it means to be good across moments of intimacy, betrayal, and quiet rupture. Amna’s latest novel, A Splintering, follows Tara, a woman navigating class, ambition, and desire as she moves from a rural village to the capital, pushing against the limits of the life she’s been given.

Small Scale Sinners: Stories

Amna describes Tara as someone who can “put on the face that she needs” depending on who she is with. Sohail immediately recognizes that elasticity—the same reaching, adapting instinct—in the women who populate her stories. The two writers found a shared preoccupation: how women reshape themselves within relationships, adapting, recalibrating, and becoming different versions of themselves depending on who they are with. It felt like a key to both of their books, and, in some ways, to the conversation itself.

A Splintering Dur E Aziz Amna [New] [Softcover]

When I pitched this interview, I imagined the three of us discussing their books through craft: voice, structure, the mechanics of building a character. But questions about narrative choices gave way to something more personal: how writing changes across time, across responsibility, across motherhood. This interview embodies the beauty of the dialogic format. I was honored to take on the role of guide, of prodder and gatherer, and to be a reason for these two writers to speak plainly about ambition, identity, and the selves that shift in the telling of stories.

Basmah Sakrani: If you think about the protagonists in your books—Tara in Dure’s, and any one of the women from Mahreen’s stories—what would they recognize in each other? What would feel familiar or unfamiliar?

Dur e Aziz Amna: I can go first. In full disclosure, I read Mahreen’s book a long time ago, so apologies if my memory is murky. But the one line that really stuck with me in “The Newlyweds” is that what really makes a woman is the flexible way in which she is able to change the nature of who she is, depending on her relationships. I am paraphrasing, but it struck me so much that I remember highlighting it.

I feel like that is also Tara, putting on the face she needs with every new person, being flexible in her idea of who she is, adapting based on who she is with.

Mahreen Sohail: Dure, I was looking through your book again this morning. Something that felt very familiar to me was that Tara is always reaching. And I think the women in my stories are also reaching, either for love or for something else.

Another thing I noticed was this disappointment with men, a slow, creeping disillusionment. I think that would feel familiar to many of the characters in my stories as well. 

I fear that anytime you put in too much specificity, it detracts from the experience.

BS: Both of your books feature characters who commit transgressive acts. As you are writing your characters and they become more real to you, how do you both decide where that moral line lies? What are you thinking when you decide to push something further or ignore that line?

MS: I am not sure that when I was writing, I was thinking about moral lines. Maybe that comes later, in the editing process, and certainly now, as I’m talking about the book.

Overall, there is this idea of women just living their lives. When you are in the midst of living, you are not thinking, this is the line I am crossing. And if the characters are well-rounded enough, it feels believable that they cross those lines, even in the context of a culture or a society like ours.

I am thinking about the story with the child soldiers, which is ambiguous. The sisters in it commit this act of kidnapping a girl. But I am hoping that the sisters’ backstory and their grief over their mother are enough to show how those choices could come about. So, it is not necessarily about crossing the moral line as much as it is about what kind of situation would allow someone to cross it. And often that happens organically. The characters do take over.

DAA: It’s funny you say that it’s in talking about the book when you realize these things. With Tara, she’s telling the story in retrospect, right? We start off with her saying, hey, I’ve done something really bad, hear me out. But it’s the fact that she can see those moral lines more clearly because she’s looking back at them.

In the moment, as Mahreen said, she’s very much just living her life and making the choices that she needs to, to survive or thrive or get ahead or whatever we would like to call it.

BS: I want to talk about being Pakistani writers. Pakistan appears differently in both your books, and I think both of you make this decision of kind of not naming the thing. Dure, you made up the village where Tara comes from, and Mahreen, you don’t name Pakistan at all, but it’s very evident in the description. How consciously do you think about that when you are creating something?

DAA: Yeah, that’s such a great question. I feel like I either have nothing to say about this or way too much.

With American Fever, it was a book very cognizant of the fact that it’s about this girl who’s from Pakistan just by the nature of what she’s doing, which is this exchange program. She feels like she’s representing the place, and then she feels the oppressiveness of that expectation.

With A Splintering, I wanted to leave all of that behind, which is why a lot of things are not named. Even the city that ends up being named, Mazinagar, is fictional, mostly because there’s so much vitriol in Tara’s language about the place that I didn’t want any small town in Pakistan to receive that.

I would have really liked to just completely strip away the proper nouns of places and markers. I also didn’t want there to be any Urdu in the book and sometimes that puzzles people, but I think I’m still trying to figure it out.

I fear that anytime you put in too much specificity, it detracts from the experience because the book can become this anthropological text versus just the story of the people who the story is about. But I’m not convinced that’s the exact solution.

MS: Yeah, I feel you, Dure. I found when I named places, they became associated with all of my specific feelings and attachments to a place. So not naming gave me this way of writing a range of experiences, a range of women who can do whatever they want, whereas otherwise, I feel like if I had named Pakistan, specifically Islamabad, I would have pigeonholed these stories into my version of it.

I find that if I plan something, it takes the magic out of it.

In some ways, it also feels like a lack. Would I be able to write a story that is very specifically Pakistani and named as such, and would it be good? So I don’t know if it’s me putting a Band-Aid on something or if it’s a good narrative choice. This one is tough for me as well.

DAA: I love that. I think naming things can also be a bit of a block for the writer.

BS: I loved how you both approached the answer to this question because in your responses, there’s this element of protection of Pakistan. Dure, you’re protecting the place from other people projecting things because of how you describe it. And Mahreen, you’re also very protective of your own ability to write beyond the place and write bigger than just the place.

DAA: Post 9/11, there was a lot of literature, some of it very good, which dealt so consciously with Pakistan as this place that either had to be explained or defended. Pakistan with a very capital P. Perhaps I was working against that. Just a small-p pakistan where it’s just a place, the way any place is a place where people live their ordinary lives.

BS: I want to transition to a question about form. Dure, you’ve written two very distinct novels. And Mahreen, you’ve got this collection, and you’re playing around a lot with form inside it. Does the form come first? Do you find relief or comfort in the conventions of the form you’re writing in?

MS: For some of the stories, the form does come first, and it helps contain the story. It defines the nature of what the story can be. But for a lot of them, it was the voice, and I don’t always know what’s going to come first.

“The Sisters” was written as a very traditional short story with a beginning, middle, and end, but it felt a little bit boring to me, so I went in and picked the lines I liked and was like, what if I just had this?

DAA: With both the novels, the voice emerged first and then the form followed.

But I’ve also learned to leave a lot of the certainties of writing by the wayside. You are always surprised and changed by your understanding of who you are as a writer. With the first book, there was an emphasis on language, culture, and cultural assimilation. That completely went by the wayside with the second. And with this third book, it doesn’t feel as voice driven, it feels more like a book about ideas.

BS: So, with that, I’m curious to understand something about how you both create. And I’ll preface this by saying I hate the word process. It just feels so erudite. But in terms of your writing style, are you outliners and planners, or are you feelers? Or is it a mix of both?

DAA: I’m not a planner at all. I still try to make notes, but then those notes get lost and they’re always, for some reason, loose leaf. So, I never know where they are. They’re never in a diary assigned for that project.

At some point you realize that’s the kind of person you are, and you live with it. But at least with the first two books, I knew what would happen at the end. I always know how the book will end, but the way we’re going to get there is very much a discovery.

MS: Yeah, I am so not a planner as well. I also do not even know how the thing will end. I find that if I plan something, it takes the magic out of it.

BS: That is very reassuring and validating, I have to admit. I’ve tried, and I’m now at the point [of] realizing I’m not one of these people. I can’t maintain this thing in a spreadsheet.

What is something in your books or your stories, a small detail, that you’re like, oh my God, I’m so proud of this?

DAA: I wish I had something I could turn to, something to hold onto in my moments of low self-esteem. This will be my homework. I will go back and find something to be proud of.

MS: I will tell you, Dure, one of the things in A Splintering that I thought was amazing was our relationship with Hamad, the husband. It was so nuanced, so well done, both his characterization and Tara’s evolving feelings towards him. It’s hard to believe you are not a planner.

For me, it’s the title. My editor came up with the title for the book, and I do quite like it. So maybe this is a moment for low self-esteem, I couldn’t even come up with a title.

BS: But you had the phrase in your story, so it was there. Who came up with your title, Dure?

DAA: The book initially sold as Farewell, Province. I came up with it and was still somewhat attached to it, but every single person hated it. It was a resounding failure, and the title we ended up with was one of 10 I’d sent in an email. It’s so funny, because I had to reverse engineer the part where it’s mentioned in the book.

BS: What are you reading right now?

MS: Just last night, I think I finished it in a day, was My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. I had preconceptions going in because the books are everywhere, but I loved it. I thought it was beautiful, calming, steadying. It was like reading someone’s diary.

I also just finished Mohammad Hanif’s Rebel English Academy and Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This is Where the Serpent Lives.

DAA: I’m thinking of Elena Ferrante’s interviews where she says that all books she grew up reading as a child were by men. Thankfully, I never had that problem. I’ve actually placed a moratorium on myself after getting so saturated with thinking about women while writing A Splintering. So now I’ve vowed to read books by men. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a novel with a fully male protagonist. So part of it is subconscious research, an anthropological interest in what are men exactly.

BS: How about you, Mahreen? What are you trying to do next?

Motherhood was really the first time where I truly felt a full abdication of the person I used to be.

MS: I am not writing much. I have a two-year-old, and I just do not know where the time goes. I do have another book I finished while I was pregnant that I’m hoping to send out. I have the ideas of a novel, but you never know where that goes.

BS: Are you both early morning writing people?

DAA: Sometimes people who don’t have kids ask me this question. I’m like, do you understand what it’s like to have this little thing that can entirely disrupt your day? This is what decides what my routine is for the day. Truly, my routine is at the mercy of the kids, but when things are working smoothly, I write in the mornings after breakfast and tap out by the afternoon.

The one thing I know is that it comes in spurts. There are times when I really, really want to write, and then I have to get all of that done, it becomes a distraction, a thing hanging over my head if I don’t do it.

MS: Before I had a baby, I could write at night. Now, after I get home from work and do bedtime, my brain is done.

Something strange also happened to me after having a kid: It’s become harder to write because the stakes for my characters don’t seem high enough. And in my life, they suddenly seem very high: I have this thing to keep alive. 

DAA: So what exactly does that mean? Did you mean your work as a writer feels like it has to now compete with your role as a mother? Or are you saying that what your characters are going through seems minuscule compared to your role as a mother?

MS: It seems terrible to do things to my characters, to do terrible things to them in a world that my son is growing up in. You know what I mean? That’s what it feels like to me. And it’s a very strange feeling.

BS: Last question. Mahreen, I was going through your other interviews, and in your interview in The Offing, you said this:

The women in these stories, and in some way many of us in real life, are wrestling with the question of how to be the best version of ourselves in our relationships—as sisters, brothers, wives, husbands, aunts, mothers—while still maintaining our independence. How do you keep some of yourself for yourself, and what is lost in the process?

So, with the discussion we’ve had today about womanhood and motherhood and being writers and having relationships and jobs and dreams and ambitions, how do you both keep some of yourself? And what do you feel like you lose in the process?

DAA: There’s this line by David Brooks, about how growing up, becoming an adult, is just how well you give up your individual freedoms and take on responsibilities.

Motherhood was really the first time where I truly felt a full abdication of the person I used to be. It was irrevocable. More than marriage, more than anything else. Now, I can’t even think of myself as anything else. The person that you are, there has to be a new person who comes in and takes that form of you.

I will stop talking now because I think I’m trying to say something, but it’s not coming out the way I want it to.

BS: It’s making sense to me.

MS: You are both further along the journey than I am. I think I have struggled to come to terms with the fact that I am fully this new person because of the small being that is co-opting me completely.

I am always finding ways to see, how can I get this part of my mental space back? It was useful to hear you say you have to just fully embrace who you are now, because I have been seeing it almost as a failing that I haven’t been able to get that version of my brain back. It is good to hear that you can’t go back to who you used to be.

7 Books Featuring Self-Sabotaging Characters

Posted on by EL Assistant2

We all have that person in our life, the one who combines ambitious intentions with crippling self-sabotage. Often, they are unaware of this and perceive themselves as perfect, if only external circumstances didn’t prevent them from reaching their potential. A bad boss takes credit for their work; a realtor costs them a deal that would’ve made them instantly rich. Unsupportive partners, parents, and ungrateful children—everyone else has stood in the way of their destiny and deserved success. In reality, the only thing standing in the way of these individuals is themselves and their inability to accept responsibility for their actions and inactions. These individuals are the creators of their own unfortunate fates.

Bookshelves are full of stories featuring characters that stumble through self-sabotage. Literature thrives on readers’ rooted interest in such flawed heroes and anti-heroes. My upcoming linked short story collection, Hands, features a main character, Hans, a blue-collar Indian immigrant seeking shortcuts and working odd jobs to make ends meet. Ultimately, when he gets in the way of his own success, Hans blames everyone but himself for his misfortune: The bullies at school; his best friend Kanti; an Indian girlfriend who isn’t Indian enough for him; and his sister’s endless nagging and superstition. Hans’s immigrant journey doesn’t crystallize into the American Dream because of his own misgivings, ill-timed decisions, and crooked thinking—but he doesn’t believe that. Everyone else is always to blame. When there’s nowhere left to point his finger at, does he finally point it toward himself? Negative. There are always customers who don’t tip enough on his pizza deliveries. 

The following reading list gathers stories of characters who can’t get out of their own way. These characters are both the aggressors and victims of their circumstances. They are hard to love, but it’s still painful to read about their collapses. In the end, readers are left feeling queasy, hoping for the best while realizing that the worst is inevitable.

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

I don’t know if I’d be a writer without Denis Johnson. There’s no Hans without Fuckhead. These loosely linked stories explore the blue-collar underbelly of desperate labor—all clouded in intoxication and the search for the next high. Fuckhead and his cast of acquaintances stumble through odd jobs, petty theft, and toxic relationships. The characters consider honesty, but ultimately reject it in favor of shortcuts and a quick buck. Drugs and the pursuit of drugs are often the crux of Fuckhead’s self-sabotage. As he hunts for the next high, Fuckhead and his grab bag of friends end each story in more trouble than they began with. The collection’s brevity makes its complexity that much more astounding. How can so few words reveal so much of who we are when the odds are stacked against us and there appears to be no way out?

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

The prospect of madness smothers every page of Doshi’s novel as Antara attempts to care for her ailing mother, Tara, suffering from dementia. Part mother-daughter drama, part psychological thriller, Burnt Sugar turns the mirror on readers and asks: who do you believe? Antara’s self-doubt stunts her ability to care for her mother. She is caged by the paralysis of her own thoughts. She questions her mother’s diagnosis, re-writes her childhood, and ultimately is unsure about who is really losing their mind. I’ve gifted this book too many times to count. It’s the most important book on Indian motherhood that I’ve ever read.

People from Bloomington by Budi Darma

Obsessive tendencies in Darma’s comedic collection drive characters to absurd behavior and trap them in their circumstances. In “Yorrick,” a man spits and pisses on his roommate’s clothes so he will stop leaving them on the bathroom floor. In “The Family M,” the first-person narrator’s car gets scratched and he becomes single-mindedly focused on getting revenge on the kid who he thinks damaged his car. The narrator in “The Old Man With No Name” literally becomes obsessed with an old man in an apartment complex and starts stalking him. These seven stories are told in first-person and feature obsessive narrators who are willingly derailed by the smallest details of everyday life.  

Somebody Loves You by Mona Arshi

Somebody Loves You centers on Ruby, a teenager who stops speaking and becomes a self-proclaimed “expert in the art of solitude and quietness.” Ruby and her older sister, Rania, are navigating adolescence without their mother after she suffers a mental breakdown. Like Burnt Sugar, the Indian mother plays a central role in the trauma on the page. However, unlike the books on this list, Ruby’s imprisonment—embodied by her choice not to speak—is a conscious decision and an attempt to free herself from her past troubles rather than drowning in them. The result is a short, challenging, and violent novel that will force the reader to grapple with the imagined and actual threats in the world. 

Whiteout Conditions by Tariq Shah

The setup: Ant returns home to Chicago to attend the funeral of his friend’s cousin, who was killed by a neighborhood dog. It’s a complicated setup that is enriched by childhood memories sprinkled throughout the short novel. All Whiteout Conditions’s characters are drunk, high, and unhinged as they mourn the sudden loss in their family. But it’s not Ant’s family. So what is he even doing there? Ant’s unexpected and often unwanted arrival causes drug-induced chaos at the funeral as a family tries to move forward while Ant pulls them back and drowns them in the past. But of course, Ant doesn’t realize his own part in the oxy-laced toxicity of this emotionally and physically violent novel.

Oksana, Behave! by Maria Kuznetsova

Oksana is selfish and self-destructive. She sleeps with a married man at her grandmother’s funeral. She drinks a lot and is generally unlikeable. But she’s funny. Is that enough? It is in Oksana, Behave!, which follows a family’s immigration journey to the United States through Oksana’s engaging and brutally honest perspective. She recalls the story of her family moving from Kiev to Florida, and describes her education in middle and high school, college, and then graduate school. The immigrant themes of losing social status, language, and homeland are integrated within this coming-of-age story. Oksana’s comedic charm makes her likeable and hateable at the same time. Ultimately, her hurtful antics induce a guilty laugh—even though she should know better.

Before the End, After the Beginning by Dagoberto Gilb

The characters in Gilb’s collection are stuck in the mud and not trying very hard to get out. They want the reader to believe that they’re doing their best, but their actions suggest otherwise. In “The Last Time I Saw Junior,” the narrator finds himself in a compromised situation, as usual, chasing the next high with an old friend in an obscure location, which is only aggravated when he slips into a drug-induced rage. In “Blessing,” a character drives hours north from El Paso to visit his ex-girlfriend who is now married with a baby. He stays in her house, falls into the same patterns that led to their breakup, and departs as lost and broken as when he arrived for the visit. Gilb’s characters hope for the best while acting on their cheap and easy desires. Their failures are internal, but the blame always lies “outside their control.”

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Turns to Music

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Two years ago, I decided to end my career as a teacher to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing full-time. I was suddenly thirty-five in a kindergartner’s shoes again, fearful in anticipation of the first day of school. I sharpened my pencils, prepped my new notebook, and nervously registered for classes. Then, just before the semester began, students received an email that a new professor would be joining the staff to lead a workshop: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

When I read Nana’s name, I skidded cartoonishly across the floor to tell my husband and then responded to the email as quickly and coherently as possible that I needed to switch into his class. I had a deep admiration for his words and how he chose to bare them to the world. My gut is always loud and demanding, but I had just started to try this new thing called “listening to it.” It was the right choice. During the semester, Nana and I found common ground over our very millennial memories and growing up in New York. We were both also dissed for having Android phones and being born in the 1900s. But most importantly, I discovered that we were united by the belief that genre is a prison. 

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has defied conventions his whole career. His writing blends surrealism with radical portraiture and horror with hope, often providing social commentary on the world around him. His short story collection, Friday Black, and debut novel, Chain Gang All-Stars, both received awards and critical acclaim. Nana’s also hell-bent on pursuing new creative challenges. So, when I learned that he was releasing a debut album,The Pisces Sciatica, I was curious about how music as a medium would evolve his work. I couldn’t wait to hear how installing new wings allowed him to fly again.

Ashley Leone: What about music liberates you to write more autobiographically?

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: People consider me a prose artist. But The Pisces Sciatica was gonna be a look at my life, and I didn’t want to do that in the same medium. In some ways, the things that I fear about music made it very attractive to me. I’m so craft-focused as a writer, but there’s a rawness in my naivete as a rapper. And I’m not saying that craft makes you a liar, but I can curate the truth into oblivion if I really want to. There was something powerful to speaking about these last couple years of my life with my actual lived-in voice, which is a less finely tuned instrument. It just felt more honest.

AL: What is meaningful to you about rap as a genre for storytelling?

NKAB: I’m from a place called Spring Valley, Rockland County, and even before I ever wrote for real, people were sitting in cars and freestyling. Music is the medium I take in most, probably, because it’s so easily embedded into your day. The artists whose work is closest to my heart are musicians.

For me, making music has a lot to do with needing something for my mind to do when I’m stressed or scared. I think on a loop. So, I listen to instrumentals and write raps to them. I have some obsessive tendencies, anyone with anxiety can connect to that. But with music, it feels natural and kind of fun to be in these repetitive loops.

AL: Is there a specific track on the album that felt most vulnerable for you to write? 

NKAB: “The Pisces Sciatica” is a song about my father and his passing, and me working with him through his cancer. The end of that first verse is “I hate it half the time, because I’m the one who signed Do Not Resuscitate.” Even saying it right now, it’s hard. It’s not something I really talk about, but for me, that was one of those moments that justified the entire project. It’s almost like I have to scream the truth in a forest where no one’s there before I go on with writing it. The music felt like this kind of empty forest for me. I’m slowly getting myself ready to write about those things in some way, shape, or form. But I am scared of it. I have so much admiration for memoirists.

AL: Have you written any fiction that’s felt just as raw and intimate to write?

NKAB: In my first book, there’s a story called “Things My Mother Said.” I think if you’re an artist, you feel this often: I just gotta say this thing. Then “The Hospital Where” is my first version of meta-analysis about writing. You could see I was already getting critical about the pursuit of an artistic existence. Those stories are like the prequel to The Pisces Sciatica.

AL: On this album, there are various references to arts, artists, and culture, like Icarus, Smokey Robinson, Emperor’s New Groove,“making weight” in sports . . . What are the mediums that influenced this album but maybe didn’t make it in as a reference? What are the artforms this album couldn’t exist without?

NKAB: Some of the important ones are the ones you named. I like big, mythic, well-known stories that have a universal lesson, that you can interpret differently if you want to. Like Icarus—the album pretty much starts on that idea, which is kind of dark.

AL: But Icarus gets off the ground. He’s figured out how!

NKAB: Exactly. My best friend messaged me, “People forget he can fly.” 

I’m so craft-focused as a writer, but there’s a rawness in my naivete as a rapper.

The album wouldn’t exist if I didn’t have exposure to rap artists like J. Cole or Kendrick, especially their deep-cut, soul-sampling songs. I couldn’t make this without a project like The Water[s] by Mick Jenkins. And I would never in another context name my own stuff, but I just know that I couldn’t make this without writing “Things My Mother Said” or “The Hospital Where” first. They helped me feel brave enough that I could.

AL: Something that I love about hybrid art is that it can only exist because of the artist who makes it. Because you’re coming from your own context, all your positionalities and intersectionalities, whatever makes you you, including your artforms. How do you feel this album specifically contextualizes you in the world? What are you representing of yourself? I heard that Goku reference, and I was like, 12-year-old Nana is so pumped that he could put this in a song.

NKAB: I actually got chills when you said that because I just did therapy before this, and we were talking about that kind of stuff. Doing inner child work has been a big breakthrough for me in general.

The front cover of The Pisces Sciatica is a place I lived in when I was young, and the back cover is of the place I lived in when I was even younger than that. So, it’s absolutely teen/adolescent Nana who’s been trapped in this context because he’s decided he has to fix this thing, and he’s been killing himself trying to become an author.

I wouldn’t say I’m a super happy person, but the people pleaser in me, with the people I’m codependent with, that part of me really likes presenting in a certain kind of heroic way. It’s savior complex stuff. My professional life also really likes that part of me, too. I’m not the most zodiac-y person, but my rising sign is Leo, and I think that part of me is the part that people see. 

There’s [a] little bit of hype and cool on the album, but the inner sad boy is powering everything else. 

AL: In fiction, some of the most compelling characters are the ones that live in their contradictions. “Best Right Now,” which is a more vulnerable, “sad boy” track, is juxtaposed with “And The Miracles,” which is a confident, boastful song. That tension is a good example of how to build a character. So, I wondered how your experience writing fiction informed how you compiled your album. How did you order your track list? How does that compare to assembling a short story collection?

NKAB: I feel like a huge part of being a writer is being able to oscillate between a macro and micro attention to whatever it is you’re doing. I would say macro is more like the structure of a song or a story, and then mega macro is the order. In [ordering] the short story collection, I was imagining it like it was a playlist. 

Revision is even more of a discovery in rap.

Now I’m actually making a playlist. The album intro is “Faith and the King.” The vibe is melancholic, the BPM is less, it’s serious. Then “Best Right Now” right after that is a really sad song. In terms of vibes, I can’t just depress everybody. So, then, “And The Miracles” is a fun moment. I do rapper shade. It’s braggadocious. I’m trying to be cool, like, “I’ve been catching bodies” but in the alley of work. You gotta keep some playfulness. I’m always thinking about that. 

The micro-level is the thing I pay most attention to. In this project, I am interested in how I can tell the truth but still be vigilant. Like, being aware of syllables, keeping the rhyme, double entendres. I am thinking with that same level of acuity. I hope.

AL: Revision is an important part of your practice as a prose writer. I know a bit about how that works for you on the page, but how does it work for you when making music? You’re considering many layers—writing lyrics, making beats, working on tone and BPM—lots of elements to be revised.

NKAB: For me, the first stage of revision is somewhere written down, and I just keep doing it until it feels perfect. It’s not that dissimilar to [prose] writing on some level. I have to be able to say it in my head without tripping once. If I trip, it means some syllable’s off, something’s a little weird.

Then, I get to the stage where I start singing out loud to myself, and it changes again. I start moving this word or that word, I look for additional meanings, see if I can get some double, triple entendres. Revision is even more of a discovery in rap. 

In “Ellison,” I said something about medaling, but I was like, wait, medaling sounds like meddling, like meddling kids. So, “Mystery Machine or Team USA, we meddling/medaling.” 

Then, one of my favorite bars in this whole album: “In this life, you could be Vince or Frédéric Weis.” Frédéric Weis is the guy Vince Carter jumped over on the USA basketball team, that famous dunk. “And if I’m offered the choice, always gonna write/right,” like right-handed dunk over him. Then I said, “going straight over your head, black boy flying, they prefer if he was dead.” Black Boy, Richard Wright. Wright like “write/right” from before.

You start digging, you find a little gold, and then you keep going. I wrote that in a hotel when I was working on Chain Gang on a four-day staycation, and I remember being like, wait, am I the best? Revision in rap is crazy because you find explosive gems, which is maybe as, or more, satisfying than revision in fiction.

AL: This goes back to being a hybrid artist and having your hybrid interests inform all your work. Because every reference you make and all the wordplay is so specific that it could only be from you.

NKAB: Yeah, what you reference creates a portrait of who you are. I don’t know how many NBA fans also know Richard Wright, but you could tell I wasn’t worried about other people getting it.

AL: You’re just bringing every part of you, and then when someone understands it or recognizes it—

NKAB: That’s a cool feeling. I feel very grateful for a moment where someone’s caring and they’re being attentive. But even with book stuff, it’s somewhat rare. There’s not enough specificity in general. Maybe it’s just inherently easier with music.

AL: How has collaborating in music inspired you to shift your fiction writing practices, if at all?

NKAB: I think I’m less afraid of collaboration in general now. I just wrote and directed a short film that we shot a little bit ago, and it’s one of the most gratifying artistic experiences I’ve ever had, actually. And that’s all collaboration. With writing, it’s just us.

Maybe what music has helped me remember is that I trust my vision enough that a wayward eye won’t destroy the project.

Getting edited is a very intimate experience, you know? I’ve obviously read your work. You can tell when someone cares and puts effort and thinks about it deeply in a serious way. And it’s a special kind of thing. Getting engineered is almost more intimate than that.

My experience was particular because Mike Mitch is a rapper’s-rapper and the engineer on the entire project. I look up to him. He’s one of my best friends and I’m getting his mentorship. It took us several years to do this, and over the course of the project, his dad was alive and then he wasn’t. So, to your point previously, he understands The Pisces Sciatica more now.

And talk about being obsessive, engineers have to listen to the thing a million times.

My regular writing process is still very solitary. I need to be a little bit alone sometimes. But you know what? I’ve sent some stuff to my agent earlier than I ever have, and maybe that’s influenced by the music. I’m trying to get a little less precious about everything. Sometimes I take a really long time. I’ve had stories for 10 or 12 years that no one has seen. And I like them!

But conversely, I finished a story yesterday that I started probably three months ago that I’ll send her. I’m trying to be more open to the idea that collaboration is not a thing that taints something, but that grows something. Whereas music is different for me—I share unmixed demos with people. Maybe what music has helped me remember is that I trust my vision enough that a wayward eye won’t destroy the project.

AL: To quote S.A.A.M: “What’s the point of dropping gems just to leave it in the vault?” The novel you wrote in college—will it ever see the light of day?

NKAB: No, no, no. That’s not a gem. I’m gonna try . . . you know what? I’m gonna completely redo it.

AL: Well, there’s something that inspired you to make it, and whatever kernel of truth exists in that is worth holding onto.

NKAB: There is a cool kernel. Everything else is not good. I just didn’t have the craft. I didn’t have the ability.

AL: Are there any other modes of artistic expression that you feel drawn to do or that you want to venture into next?

NKAB: I’ve been into photography and film, but I’ve stepped into the short film stuff right now, and it’s really sickening. It’s my whole personality. I’m sorry to my students because we screened like four short films in our last class. 

AL: Any last thoughts to share?

NKAB: I’m really grateful for every single person that listens to this. I’m really grateful that you listened to it. Even one person enjoying [it] is really nice for me. 

I also want to highlight the mix. Mike Mitch did so much cool shit in the mix. It’s just very impressive. That’s another thing about collaboration. You feel better about saying how good your shit is, because it’s not just you.

Observations from Inside Immigration Court

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

The Gauntlet: Observations from Immigration Court by Laurie Lathem

“Aquí estoy,” reads the text from the man I am supposed to meet. I am here.

All I know of him is that his name is Dani, he is from Ecuador, and he is scared. It is a cold, damp morning in November, and we have arranged to meet in front of a coffee shop near the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza for his asylum hearing. But I don’t see him, and I’m worried that he is in the wrong place. If he misses his hearing, the judge will issue an expedited deportation order. The night before, Dani texted me that he was “aterrada.” Between my phone set to English and my less-than-excellent Spanish, the text conversation was so full of typos and mistakes that I didn’t notice the feminine form of the word terrified. With cold fingers, I am texting back, “Donde esta?” when I am approached by a woman in black leggings and long false eyelashes. “Hola,” she says with a deeper than average voice, and I understand why Dani has double the reason to be afraid of being detained by ICE. 

The security line to get into the massive building is unusually long, and Dani has no coat, though the wind is biting. I offer her mine, my scarf at least. She declines, bouncing up and down in her high heeled boots. She tells me that she lives in Corona. She works as a home health aide during the day and cleans office buildings at night. On the way through security, we are barked at several times by overwhelmed security guards, and when we arrive on the 14th floor, we don’t know which way to go. The floors that house the immigration courts are labyrinthine and confusing. Turns lead to dead ends or else go around in circles. Adding to the disorientation, the directional signs pointing to the numbered courtrooms have recently been taken down.

I ask a guard for help, and we head down the narrow hallway. We make a sharp turn and directly in front of us is what Dani has been fearing: a group of masked and armed ICE agents. They stand around an open doorway to one of the courtrooms, leaning casually against the walls on both sides of the hallway, making the space tighter than it already is. We have no choice but to walk through them. Dani’s boots click on the floor as she walks in front of me and between the ICE agents on either side of us, their gaiters and balaclavas tight across their faces. Standing among the ICE agents is the woman that some people call “Icicle.” She is under five feet tall, small-boned and thin. She is known to taunt photographers and brag about the number of people detained in court. As a supervisor here on the floor, she is the tiny boss to these men who tower over her. She looks like a child, with large brown eyes and hair pulled back in a tight bun. Sometimes she sucks on a lollipop. She is the only one who is maskless.

Inside the courtroom, Dani and I take a seat, and as the judge hears other cases, we wait. ICE lingers in the hallway. Dani notices my tattoo and shows me hers in the same place on the inner forearm, a butterfly. She leans her head back on the wall and closes her eyes. 

As a court observer with New Sanctuary Coalition, I volunteer several times a month to accompany people to their routine asylum hearings when they need moral support. They know that having someone with them is no protection against being detained, and yet it is at least something, a small kindness. I often text with the person ahead of meeting them on the day of their hearing. We are total strangers. Sometimes they share something of their stories with me. Invariably, they tell me how scared they are. One man asks if he should bring along his medication in case he is detained, and I have to tell him that ICE confiscates medications but he should bring it anyway. 

People leave the courts jubilant that a judge has granted them more time to make their cases, only to be taken by ICE in the hallway.

There have always been observers in immigration court. These hearings are by law open to the public, the idea being that deciding matters of liberty and family unity should not take place behind closed doors. But since ICE began abducting people in these buildings, the job of a court observer is more consequential. Among other things we do is to make sure to have the person’s information, including emergency contacts, in case they are detained. Some days, the security guards are helpful. Other days they seem especially anxious, even hostile, and they keep us from talking to people in the waiting rooms. On these days, all we do is stay and be seen. It is enough to be visible, to send a message to ICE that we are here, watching. There is a kind of tribalism in the courts, ICE agents on one side, and court observers, lawyers, advocates on the other. Even the press, though avowedly unbiased by nature, is there for a reason. Each of us knows where the other stands. 

This is the new reality of the immigration courts. They are traps for those who arrive papers in hand for their court appointed hearings, faces tight with fear, often with young children in tow. If they fail to show up, the judges will issue immediate removal orders. But showing up is a game of Russian Roulette. ICE regularly detains people in these very hallways, often violently separating children from their parents. It doesn’t matter if the judge has granted a continuance, or if there is no history of arrest—according to official records, more than 70% of those held by ICE nationwide have no criminal record. People leave the courts jubilant that a judge has granted them more time to make their cases, only to be taken by ICE in the hallway. 

On any given weekday, the waiting rooms begin to fill at 8AM. People from Ecuador, Venezuela, Senegal, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Guatemala take their seats and wait to be called. They are parents with young children and teenagers, couples, single men, single women. They live in the Bronx, Corona, Yonkers. They carry backpacks, file folders, baby blankets, and toys. Most do not have lawyers. Their faces register anything from mild anxiety to dread, and in some cases outright panic. The fear in these halls is like a stench, like smoke from a fire that everyone is breathing. 

Only the children seem unaware of the danger. Dressed in their Sunday best—girls in dresses and pigtails with bows, boys in crisp pants and button-down shirts—they run and play in the halls, oblivious. The parents admonish their children to stay close, to be quiet.

I check the accompaniment group’s Signal chat, which we use to monitor ICE’s whereabouts. It stays active with updates. None on 20. Heavy ICE presence on 14. A murder of ICE agents on 22. We never know where ICE will gather, but it becomes obvious when they are about to detain someone. A couple of agents will be joined by a few more, and a few more after that, until there are eight or ten of them pacing and peering into an open courtroom door. Photographers, if they are not already on the floor, will arrive and take their places against a wall, close but not too close to the ICE agents. Since summer, there have been photographers in the courts every day. They document scenes of family separation, of terror and anguish that otherwise would be impossible to fathom. As disbelief begins to register on the face of a person being surrounded by ICE agents, as the disbelief turns to panic, shutters click away and the knot of people moves down the hallway—photographers, advocates and lawyers, ICE agents, friends and family of the detained all moving in a tight scrum through the narrow space until the detainee is disappeared behind a door and is gone. The photographers turn to those left behind, the spouses and partners, sisters, husbands, the now traumatized children as they head for the elevators. Keeping abreast of ICE’s movements through the building is all we can do to try to anticipate their actions and to support those in danger. We are relieved on the days when, unaccountably, they are nowhere to be found. 

Much of my time in court is spent in this waiting room: witnessing, talking with people, trying to help where I can. I speak with a lawyer who sits with a stack of files on her lap, looking distraught and exhausted. She knows that her clients, a couple from Ecuador with three young children, are not going to show up for the hearing they are already late for and now they will be getting deportation orders. More and more of her clients are no-shows these days, she says, no matter how hard she begs them not to give up on the process.

A mother from Honduras eyes the agents with fear as her kids play a game on her phone. A young couple arrives; the mother pushes a baby in a carriage, the father carries a toddler. They make their way between two lines of ICE agents, single file, eyes straight ahead, pigtails bobbing over the father’s shoulder. There is no way to know which families will remain intact at the end of the day. 

A man from Ecuador sitting nearby looks nervous. When I ask if he is afraid, he says God will protect him. A young man from Peru leaving his hearing asks if I can walk him out of the building. We don’t see any ICE agents, but he is so scared that he asks if I can escort him all the way to the subway. He is 23 years old, the same age as my son. 

On the day of Dani’s hearing, she and I sit in the crowded courtroom and wait for her name to be called. She asks if I think it’s OK if she goes to the bathroom. I say yes if she goes quickly. I worry about her being in the hallway alone, but I feel I should stay behind in case the judge calls her. 

Dani leaves her purse with me on the bench and steps out. I peek out into the hallway where ICE agents are amassing in front of a different courtroom, wondering whether they have a target in mind or are there for sheer intimidation. Some wear tactical vests, mirrored sunglasses and baseball caps in addition to the masks. They look like soldiers going into combat in the Zombie apocalypse. Others wear casual street clothing and pull their gaiters up around their noses, leaving their eyes visible. Not only do the agents not identify themselves, they hide their faces and oftentimes their badges as well. 

There is no way to know which families will remain intact at the end of the day.

ICE says masks are used to protect the agents from doxing, to protect their families, the irony of which cannot be lost on anyone. But besides creating an accountability void, what does the masking do? There is a kind of performativity to it, a thuggishness meant to threaten and bully—and it works. I try to imagine them at home, those linebacker-sized arms tucking a child into bed. Whenever I look directly into the eyes of an ICE agent, I am hoping to glean something of humanity, of reason. But I don’t see anything that can illuminate the cleaving they must do in order to do their jobs.

As usual, “Icicle” is the only agent on the floor who’s not wearing a mask. This somehow makes her the scariest one of them all. That “Icicle” doesn’t feel she has to hide her face tells us that she dares us to challenge her. That she stands by what she is doing. 

The Ku Klux Klan wore masks to shield the identity of their members who were bankers, lawyers, and leaders of their communities. But it was no accident that their elaborate costumes—conical hats, white robes—became instruments of terror all on their own. On the other hand, perpetrators of state-sponsored terror campaigns such as in Nazi Germany and Argentina’s “Dirty War” didn’t hide their identities at all, presumably because they didn’t think they would ever be held accountable. They were following the orders of the state, just as ICE officers say they are doing now. Do the laws of the state override personal accountability? At this moment in the United States, we are living inside this question. International human rights law rejects the doctrine of “due obedience,” so what kind of reckoning awaits those who enable DHS and ICE? If they believe they are only following orders, then why the masks?

It is because of the activities of the KKK that eighteen states have anti-mask laws, though they have been challenged in the courts on First Amendment grounds. In New York State, a mask ban was recently defeated by the ACLU which argued that it stifled dissent. Both sides of the political divide have fought for the right to wear masks and also for mask bans. Since COVID and the attempts to suppress pro-Palestine protests, the issue of masks has only become more fraught, a political yo-yo to say the least. But in the halls of immigration court and elsewhere, masks allow ICE to engage in cruel abductions and family separations without due process and with no accountability. As an inevitable and predictable fallout, ICE impersonators are now preying on women in immigrant communities, and according to a recent FBI bulletin, kidnapping and sexually assaulting them. 

Dani comes back from the bathroom, and soon after, the judge calls her. She smiles at me nervously, goes through the little swinging gate and takes her seat in front of the judge. 

One day, I help a woman from Honduras fill out the emergency contact form before her hearing. Her name is Noemi, and she has two boys with her, Jeremy and Justin, in third and fifth grade. They are dressed in shirts and ties, and they interpret for me when my Spanish fails. Inside the small and airless courtroom for Noemi’s hearing, the judge is weary but not unkind. He drones on about “advisals,” then one by one attends to the cases, first in Kréyol and then in Spanish, with interpreters appearing on a screen. In every case, he states the government’s assertion that the respondent is in the country illegally. In every case, he sets the next hearing for August 2026. 

These courtrooms scenes can feel like another universe, one completely detached from what is happening in the hallways. One gets the sense that the courts are operating the way they are supposed to, with judges fairly deciding whether a case has merit and giving the respondents time to get a lawyer and to gather evidence for their cases. At least, that’s how it feels for now. Many judges considered favorable to asylum claims are being fired, and ones with DHS prosecution backgrounds are replacing them.

When it is Noemi’s turn, she and her boys sit at the table in front of the judge. Her back is to the room and to the doorway, where I see ICE agents beginning to arrive and gather, “Icicle” among them. I am sitting next to the NYC Comptroller, Brad Lander, who is often here, and we share a concerned look. Whenever ICE agents converge in various states of agitation, it becomes nerve racking and necessary to try to determine who their target might be. I stare at Noemi’s back. The judge asks if she would like to terminate her case. She must decide right away. To terminate or dismiss a case should mean that the government no longer seeks to deport the respondent, but ICE has been asking judges to dismiss cases precisely so that respondents no longer have an active case before the court and are therefore technically subject to expedited removal—which means that ICE can snatch them as soon as they leave the courtroom. 

ICE says masks are used to protect the agents from doxing, to protect their families, the irony of which cannot be lost on anyone.

The judge repeats that Noemi must decide right now, and I don’t know if it is good news or a trick or how much she understands. Noemi responds, “Si,” deciding to terminate her case. Her hearing is quickly adjourned, and I meet her at the door. My heart is pounding. We walk out into the hallway right past the ICE agents. I ride the elevator down with Noemi and her boys. In the lobby, she smiles and we say goodbye as her boys skip ahead of her towards the revolving doors.

I go back upstairs and a little later, I sit with two sisters from Venezuela, Nelsy and Astrid, and Nelsy’s son who is about seven or eight. They have had their hearings and are waiting for their brother, Luís, to leave the same courtroom where his hearing is now occurring. 

ICE agents begin to gather and hover. They seem a little more agitated than usual. They adjust their gaiters, peer inside the courtroom and back out again. We learn that this judge is new, another reason for concern. The sisters are scared. I am taking down their emergency contact information in a hurry when Nelsy whispers something to me. “No entiendo,” I say, and she repeats it, slower and a little louder but not much. “I have my next hearing in August of 2026,” she says. “Will ICE be here then?” 

 “Desculpe,” I say, and the word doesn’t do nearly enough to convey how sorry I am that she has to ask me this. I tell her we never know when they will be here. The little boy gets up and runs in the direction of the ICE agents; Nelsy calls him back.

Our accompaniment group quickly arranges to surround Luís when he comes out of the courtroom. Sometimes this helps, although most of the time it doesn’t do anything and the person is detained anyway. Nevertheless, it is all we can do. He comes out. He is young and looks very tired and worried. He says he has to go down to the 15th floor to attend to some paperwork, so we post people around him and walk toward the elevators. The ICE agents do not approach, which is some kind of miracle except that we know someone else will be taken. On the 15th floor, Luís looks dazed. He puts his head on the wall and closes his eyes. 

We go back up to the courtroom where ICE is still hovering by the door. The press is there now, a small bank of photographers. All this activity tells us a detainment is imminent. ICE agents keep looking inside the courtroom where there are only two respondents left. We hear from another court observer that one of them has been here less than two years, which means he is the likely target, as the current rules state that unless a person can prove they have been in the country for at least two years, they are subject to expedited removal. Our group meets the man at the door. He is with his wife, an American citizen. They give their information to one of the observers, and then we make a circle around them and make our way through the small waiting room where the ICE agents are. They swoop in and push the man against the wall. The cameras are click-clicking. The man looks surprised. He makes no sound. It is the wife who yells, “Why are you taking him? This is stupid! This is so stupid!” As our observers go to her, hold her hand, speak quietly to her, she breaks down. The agents hustle the man, who has not uttered a sound, down an ill-lit hallway. It is only when he is out of sight that we can hear shouting and scuffling from around the dark corner. The wife sobs. A priest walks with her to the elevator. I go with them. She keeps saying, “I knew it! I knew it!” 

We ride down the elevator together, the priest’s hand on her shoulder. They are headed to Representative Dan Goldman’s office for help with tracking her husband through ICE’s system. There is no way to comfort her as she cries. I say goodbye, tell her I’m sorry and that I hope her husband is freed very soon. Then I take the subway home, unable to shake the image of the woman crying, of her husband’s stunned silence as he was hustled down the hallway. I am afraid for her and for him, afraid that one day I will have grown accustomed to walking the gauntlet of ICE agents. 

The judge verifies Dani’s basic information, and, as she looks over Dani’s filings, something in her tone changes. She appears to be choosing her words carefully to protect Dani’s privacy. That the judge seems sympathetic bodes well for Dani going forward because this is the same judge who will eventually decide her case. She sets a date for Dani’s individual, and final, hearing for late in 2026. Dani says, “Grácias.” She comes through the little gate, and we head out to the hallway. ICE agents lean against the wall and watch us pass. 

We take the elevator down. Dani is eager to get to work. As we pass through the lobby, her steps get lighter and quicker. The revolving doors deliver us onto the sidewalk where there is a rush of fresh air, people hustling past on their way to do normal everyday things, a blue sky. We have spent four hours on high alert in the stifling, airless rooms of 26 Federal Plaza, rooms steeped in fear. Out here, the weather is blustery and brisk. Dani smiles. She hugs me and says, “Grácias por todo.” I want to say something more than “De nada,” but she turns quickly, heads for the subway, and is gone.

Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Blow Yourself Up” by Ankur Thakkar

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Blow Yourself Up by Ankur Thakkar, which will be published on September 15th, 2026 by Triquarterly Books. You can pre-order your copy here.

Blow Yourself Up is a story of first love across cities, spanning the decade that transformed the internet.

In the halls of an elite East Coast high school, Arjun and Payal fall in love as the world begins to tilt toward the digital. Over the next eight years, their trajectories diverge as sharply as the fractured internet itself. Payal ascends to the dizzying, dopamine-fueled heights of New York’s influencer economy, finding fame on Boost, a looping video app that is as rewarding as it is demanding. Meanwhile, in a cavernous office in Chicago, Arjun, a musician whose dreams have quieted, now cleans up the same platform’s debris, moderating the internet’s darkest videos. When a brutal act of political violence against a beloved musician goes viral, this rip in reality forces the pair to confront the motivations of the platforms they inhabit. A sharp exploration of creative ambition and the multifarious nature of identity, this is a story of love in the time of infinite scroll and a look at what we sacrifice to be seen.

Here is the cover, designed by Matt Avery:

Ankur Thakkar: This novel is a love story (and so, a ghost story), told from both characters’ perspectives, a will-they-won’t-they narrative spanning from the era of the first smartphones to when the internet scrambled our brains. It’s about making a creative life as the internet changed what creativity means. There aren’t obvious visuals for this story—rather, there are, but I wasn’t interested in them. The designer provided several great directions, but this figure immediately stood out. I couldn’t have dreamt it up myself, but it felt so right. There’s the tension between digital and analog life, of identities coming into being, and the undercurrent of yearning that guides both characters. I would have been equally drawn to the figure if it were stenciled on a wall, used as an album cover, or as a posthumous symbol. I’m so grateful to have this horny emo book reflected through Matt Avery’s palette.

Matt Avery: For this cover, we wanted to convey a few themes. The novel has two main characters that are very much online. But we didn’t want any overt references to social media or the internet. Another question was how to channel or play off the main title (without actually illustrating a “blow up”). The author and publisher provided a lot of promising suggestions and I was able to create or find a good number of options that felt like they resonated with the text. During that process, I remembered a couple figures I had drawn previously that I might be able to work with to suggest the characters’s grappling with identity—as well as their online experience. However, an expressed preference at the outset was for “no people/figures.” I understood why—and at the same time felt that by layering the drawings we wouldn’t depict a fixed identity and would provide a sufficiently open-ended reading. Are we seeing two people? One person transmogrifying? Or a digital will-o’-the-wisp? You’ll have to read the novel to (not) find out.

Hairballs Are My Love Language

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

A Hairy Style

She is the hairiest girl in North America. This is why he sold all his belongings, hitched five rides on five different vehicles with wheels, and arrived at her doorstep with a speech so polished she couldn’t think of a way to say no. She cleared out the corner of her closet that usually housed her striped scarf collection—a perfectly sized nook for the curled-up body of a full-grown man and his loom. He sleeps there, during the few hours of night when she is stillest, but mostly he stands beside her, his fingers poised for collection. 

In the morning, she rolls out of bed like a tumbleweed. She crouches in front of her floor-length mirror. He crouches behind her. She sprays down all the hair on her body, then begins to lay it back into place. He opens the front pocket of his button-up coat, which he fills with the hairs that fall as she grooms herself. She uses a brush—the kind for horses—to perfect the aerodynamic look that she has been told “suits her figure well.” When she is done, he scrapes and bends the brush until a flat pancake of hair drops onto his lap. Excited, he adds it to his pocket. 

At the coffee shop, he sucks the foam rosetta off the top of her latte. She doesn’t like the texture. He loves the art. She swallows one strand of hair. It curls around her tonsil. Before she can cough it up, he reaches two elegant fingers down her throat, extracts it, shakes off the wetness, and adds it to his pocket. 

All day at work and on the bus and between being at work and being on the bus, she plays with her hair. She stretches and twirls the curls growing from her scalp. Scratches at the fuzz on her kneecaps. Twists the strands hanging from her armpit. All day at her work and on the bus and between her being at work and being on the bus, he catches and collects and then arranges the hairs in his pockets. Long hairs for the inseam, thick ones for the waistband, fine for the hem. 

In the evening, after she showers, he slips his fingers down the drain to dislodge a clump of hair left behind. He has a tool to reach where his fingers cannot, and he operates it deftly, maneuvering it down the pipe, then activating its pincers. The drain belches then swallows the water formerly trapped by the clump. He meticulously rinses the soap from every strand, before sorting them into the piles next to his loom. 

She brushes and blow-dries. He catches. She settles into bed. He collects the hairs that drift into the air as she tosses and turns. When her body finally gives into sleep, he retires to his nook, and takes inventory. Before he rests, he glances up at all the skirts hanging above him. A constellation of inspiration. 

They continue like this for months. 

Three weeks after he has left her and one day after Easter, she walks to CVS for discounted candy. As she is choosing between peanut butter bunnies and marshmallow eggs, she glances down and sees it. She smiles knowingly and repeats to herself the first words he ever spoke to her: “I am going to be the first man to wear a hair skirt on the cover of Vogue, and I need your help.”

Stem of Thorns

At fourteen, my body grew its disagreement from the inside out. When I had finally convinced myself it wouldn’t happen, a stem of thorns lurched from my belly, shivered when it felt the cool air settle around it, then curled its long arm down my leg and rooted there. My father shrieked and wailed and blamed himself and kicked me out of the house. It’s not because I don’t love you, it’s just that, well, you know, your younger siblings . . . he broke off and got real quiet. Then caved: Steve said it could be contagious. Steve was just a man. He was not an expert. 

On Facebook, I found three others, and we all moved into an apartment together. The apartment had big windows that made the whole place smell like warmth. I got a job as a figure model for an artist who sold her drawings to people who were fascinated by my unique look. She made lots of money. I made just enough to pay rent. With the help of my roommates, I learned how to prune myself and photosynthesize and ignore my father’s phone calls. By spring, all of my limbs were in bloom. 

On Sundays, when most of the world took the day off to pray or pretend to pray or watch their children play baseball, we gathered. In what we called The Garden, for obvious reasons, we picked and squished each other’s aphids and exchanged pollen and gossiped about our bosses. 

Most often, we were left alone in The Garden. We had one place, and they had all the others. 

But one week, as I was bending toward the sun, I heard footsteps, then silence, then the sound of air being sucked and compressed through a pair of nostrils. You smell so . . . floral. The torso of the woman behind me was hinged at a ninety-degree angle from the hips, her nose stationed at the entrance of one of my buds, inhibiting my epinasty.

She didn’t say hello. 

I turned to face her, and the wind blew her hair toward me. She smelled like wet denim. I just love the look of it, like, see, she ran her hand down her arm’s smooth skin-casing, We’re so much less interesting. I half nodded, half shook my head, unsure how to respond or otherwise react. She took it as a sign to keep talking. Oh, my mother would just hate you. She opened her fists toward me and then scrunched them back shut, like one would do to make a baby giggle. I let out an uncomfortable grunt-laugh. She’s always going on about your smell and how much of an intrusion it is. She claims it gives her headaches, says that’s the first step to . . . catching it. 

Certain her mother had never been close enough for a smell-induced headache, I made a face that said, That’s crazy, that must be really hard for you, which was the response she wanted. 

She plucked a flower from my arm and tucked it into her hair. 

The flower died by the time she got home, or fell on the way, but the story of her day of experimentation lasted her for years.

Using Absurdity to Expose the Faulty, Inhumane Logic of Our World

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Look to your left. Now look to your right. I’m 100 percent confident that any one of those people in your eyeline—regardless of their reading taste—would love a book by Rachel Khong if you put it in their hands. Like many readers, I fell in love with Khong’s writing through her debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin. I recently finished listening to her latest novel, the New York Times best-selling Real Americans, on audiobook and found myself taking the long way just to keep listening a few minutes more. My Dear You, her new short story collection, completes the trinity—the literary treasure trove that is Khong’s body of work.

In My Dear You, Khong turns her attention to a wide-ranging cast of characters navigating scenarios that are at once surreal and deeply familiar: a government program that alters how people perceive race and gender, a cat that conjures the ghosts of past relationships, a vision of heaven where memory itself begins to slip. Oscillating between the absurd and the intimate, these stories explore identity, love, relationships, friendship, and the quiet, often overlooked ways we misunderstand one another. The result is a collection that is as funny as it is unsettling—one that asks what it means to love, to belong, and to be a person in a world that rarely makes as much sense as we’d like it to.

I sat down with Khong to talk about absurdity as a lens, identity and belonging, and the complicated, often contradictory ways we connect with one another.

Greg Mania: One thing I love about My Dear You is how the stories take these absurd or speculative situations and use them to look closely at very ordinary human feelings. What draws you to that space where the strange and the everyday collide?

Rachel Khong: I guess I don’t think of the strange and the everyday as separate things. To me, the everyday is strange, and vice versa. So many things that are happening now are so strange and unbelievable—whether it’s the Epstein files or anything that comes out of Trump’s mouth. At the same time, our internal lives are such rich territory. Obviously we’re still writing and painting and making music about human emotion. Even though we’ve been doing it for hundreds—thousands—of years, there is so much more to write and sing about and explore: The complexity of human emotion is endlessly deep and interesting and just weird. I feel that it’s my job to make art that comes from my particular experience, living through this very strange moment in time, metabolizing the events I’m living through on a national and global level, but also on a really private and personal level. I’m not sure why the stories get so weird, but if I were to articulate it—though articulating feels really antithetical to the way I work, which is more intuitive—I think it’s a reaction to our circumstances: When the powers that be want sameness, conformity, and fascism, I want to exist in the world of my own imagination. 

GM: Why do you think the absurd can sometimes reveal truths about the real world more clearly than realism can?

I don’t think of the strange and the everyday as separate things.

RK: Absurdity is a way of exposing the faulty logic of systems we’ve grown used to. Realism reproduces the world as we recognize it, but I’m more interested in making the structure beneath our world visible. When something becomes ridiculous (like what happens in “The Freshening,” for example), we are more likely to question if our rules make sense to begin with. I recently read the stories of Leonora Carrington; her stories are so strange and absurd—our world isn’t always recognizable in them. But what she and other surrealists did was to suggest that the systems we take for granted as rational and logical really aren’t so—they’re actually terrible and inhumane. What’s absurd isn’t talking hyenas, it’s inequality and the fact of billionaires; it’s losing track of every person’s humanity. Absurdity can be such a powerful lens for looking at racism, misogyny, capitalism—it reveals the illogic embedded within systems that present themselves as rational.

GM: This is your first short story collection. What did writing short stories allow you to explore that felt different from writing a novel?

RK: Stories were how I found my way into writing fiction in the first place. I have been writing stories far longer than I’ve been writing novels. Often, I use stories as a way of exploring topics—writing my way into what I’m interested in. Goodbye, Vitamin grew from a short story about a character named Ruth. That novel expanded my interest in memory, and how we can love each other with our faulty memories. And though they are so tonally different, writing [the story] “My Dear You” led me to writing Real Americans, because it introduced me to my interest in choices: What do we choose for us, and what’s already chosen? How do we become who we become? Stories are a way to experiment, too: I’m much more wacky and playful in my stories because I think wackiness is much more manageable and palatable in small doses—it would get annoying (for both the reader and the writer) in a novel. And I love precision and brevity in writing; I love that stories can be distilled and potent. 

GM: A lot of the stories seem interested in how we see one another—or fail to. I’m thinking in particular of the story where the government injects everyone with a drug that makes them see others as their own race and gender. What interested you about exploring identity and perception that way?

RK: I’ve been really interested in projection for a while now—what we think and assume about other people. I think it’s gotten even worse with social media and the internet. These tools that were supposed to help us have a more democratic society are instead fostering and fomenting a more fascistic one. We assume so much about other people that really isn’t true; we forget the richness of every individual person, forget that everyone else’s lives are as complex as our own. What we assume about other people can be fatal, especially when it comes to Black men and boys dying at the hands of police. How did things get so inverted that the people who are supposed to be protecting us instead cause harm to an entire community? With “The Freshening” in particular, I wanted to try to answer that question: How could we stop this violence? How could we stop making these fatal, racist assumptions? Obviously the answer isn’t so straightforward. 

GM: There’s also this recurring question across the collection about what it means to be an Asian woman in America. When you were writing these stories, what kind of questions about identity and belonging kept surfacing for you?

These tools that were supposed to help us have a more democratic society are instead fostering and fomenting a more fascistic one.

RK: The main question was probably, “This again?” We’ve talked a lot about absurdity, and I do find racism more than a little absurd. I was interested in writing racism in the way that I experience it most often, which is in a quieter way, almost as an afterthought. It happens when doctors don’t take my complaints seriously, because I’m “probably” healthy. It happens when people confuse me for another Asian author, which happens more often than you’d think. The fact that my books get the most attention when it’s AANHPI month in May. A lot of literature covers racism that’s more overt, that’s really loud, but I was interested—especially in these stories—in presenting it in the more mundane way that I often experience it. 

GM: The dating stories in the collection are often very funny but also a little painful in a recognizable way—awkwardness, misread signals, lingering ghosts from past relationships! What about love and intimacy at this stage of life felt especially rich or compelling for you to explore?

RK: It’s been a while since I went on a date, and I never experienced online dating, but I can recall the weirdness of dating so vividly—and can imagine the weirdness of it, especially now with apps and, like I said, so much projection about other people—that I wanted to write about it. I wanted to write about desiring and being desired, about expectations and falling short, about how the way we love other people might not be exactly the way that they’d prefer to be loved. We bring a lot of assumptions into relationships—about the other person, about what relationships should even be—and at the same time, relationships can be so life-changing and essential and deeply loving. I’m sorry the fetishizing guy is named Greg, by the way. I promise he’s not named after you! 

GM: I appreciate the clarification—I was getting a little nervous there! But I’m curious about what you said about people wanting to be loved in particular ways—why do you think that mismatch happens so often in relationships?

I’m not entirely sure our lives are so ordinary; I’m not entirely sure things are exactly as they seem.

RK: Well, every person’s perspective is so different—shaped by an entire life. I think the mismatch happens with books, too; I could give a book I love to a friend, but my friend might hate it. Who or what you connect with can be so subjective, which is why it feels kind of miraculous when you do meet someone or something you deeply connect with. With both books and relationships, I think it’s important to be humble and open. The assumptions we bring to relationships probably aren’t correct. Can we be open to how interesting the person or book might be, rather than jump to conclusions based on who or what we’d like them to be? 

GM: Several of the stories brush up against the supernatural. There are ghosts, heaven, even the end of humanity! What do those possibilities open up for you when you think about what might exist beyond the boundaries of ordinary life?

RK: I’m not entirely sure our lives are so ordinary; I’m not entirely sure things are exactly as they seem. Our lives are both ordinary and not—that’s always on my mind as I write fiction. It’s pretty magical that the world we live in exists at all, and that we’re here for it. It’s magical that a tree grows from a seed, or that a baby forms in a womb. That our hearts just beat, until they don’t. We’re walking contradictions, in that we are all ordinary and mortal and limited, but we also have these amazing minds and imaginations that can take us practically anywhere. I write, in part, to remind myself of this contradiction: My life can feel so ordinary on a day-to-day basis, yet the fact that I’m here at all is pretty miraculous and odds-defying, and one day I’m going to die. What am I doing with that? Am I spending time with my closest friends, am I doing the most human things possible, am I caring as deeply as I can for the people I’m in relationships with, am I making things—am I creating—what I feel called to? Writing is how I remember what’s most important to me.

GM: What did writing this collection teach you about yourself?

RK: Honestly, putting all these stories together made me a little sick of myself. But as I grow as a writer, I’m learning to have compassion for myself, too. I did learn a lot from this collection, but it’s hard to separate growing older from the writing itself. For me, they’re intertwined and inextricable. I’m grateful to have writing, not to make sense of life—because a lot of it doesn’t make sense—but to accompany me in life.

Quick, Playful Writing Exercises for When You’re Feeling Stuck

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

A student recently asked, looking at the bookshelf in my office, “How did all these people get from here to there? From words on a screen to bound on the shelf?” I started to give her practical advice about staying in the chair and reading the right novels, but that is only a small part of how a piece of art grows up.

We are not ever just writers—we are also sons and daughters of good parents and disappointing parents and we are partners who need to grab a quart of milk on the way home and parents who crawl into bed with the little ones late at night to admire them when they are still, even though we know we don’t have any tiredness to spare. We are students and teachers. We are readers, taking in the universes created by other minds. Our stories and poems and essays are written in and among and because of these moments. A scene is not only a moment on the page that takes place in space and time—the writing of that scene takes place in space and time too. I remember working on an especially dark section of my first novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, in which the character based on my great-grandmother escapes pogroms by fleeing with her children into the Russian wilderness where she survives on tree bark, and it so happened that this writing day took place beside a swimming pool at a Southern California hotel where my father-in-law was staying while he visited us. I spent the morning in the shade surrounded by Disneyland-bound families and I wrote about starvation. You can’t see that in the pages, but the energy of that good, easy day provided an opposite to the story from the past and its fictional counterpart. That strange pairing was part of how I powered the writing.

We do not write outside of our lives or in spite of them, but because of them. Writers make a choice to carve out significant time—some squeeze writing in while a baby sleeps on their chest or during the lunch hour. Some dictate a story while driving to work. The walls of stuck-ness are easily built. Time is always short; fear is a capable bricklayer; self-doubt and envy can construct a windowless room in seconds. While I love encouragement and good cheer (can you see me waving my pom-poms? I am!), those are not enough to free us. What I believe in, what has worked for me over and over, is a repertoire of small, playful, and unintimidating experiments. Lots of them. A small choice is huge. So often you need a little light, some air, and a handle turns in your hand, you peek through to the next thing, and you’re back, you’re in, you’re running.

My new book, Unstuck, contains all the skeleton keys to all the secret doors I know—I’m sharing a few of them with you here.

Doorway: Begin Anywhere 

There Is No Better Time, No Right Answer

You have this idea for a novel. A young woman disappears in the woods, or a new planet is colonized, or two people fall in love. Ahead of you there are no fewer than one jillion decisions: Are we in 1876? Is the couple driven apart by their hateful fathers? Does the book take place over the course of twenty-four hours or a year? Is it told in first person? And that’s only the big stuff. Every page is a string of words picked by you. Every scene is populated, full of characters and places (real or imagined) where every tree, every vase full of dead flowers, every old, tired cat is placed there by you.

We do not write outside of our lives or in spite of them, but because of them.

You cannot, no matter how much you wish, know at the start how this will unfold. Like all the best parts of being alive, it requires you to enter without a map or a promise of success.

I was in such a place when my eldest child was in the fifth grade and it was time to go on tours of middle schools. I had spent the morning staring at a Word document on which I intended to begin a new novel. The document was a white, ominous nothingness. My job was much too big. Defeated, I closed the computer and picked up my kid at his sweet little elementary school, a place that had seen him through the pandemic, that had brought him from a tiny person to a big kid. We drove to a middle school and parked. Nervous eleven-year-olds and their more nervous parents hummed in small groups. Inside, the building felt huge. The echo of sneakers in the concrete stairwells, and halls leading to other halls. How were we here? How was my small person going to be okay in this wilderness? We came around the corner and there was a lit theater marquee at the end of the hall with these words: “BEGIN ANYWHERE.—John Cage.” I stood there for a long minute. My child tugged at me. He did not know how to be a middle schooler yet, as he would not know how to be a high schooler a few years later or all the steps to come after. I did not know what this new novel would contain, as I had not known how the three before it would work until I had written through the years and the many drafts. “I’m ready,” I said, and we began there, at the anywhere where we stood.

Key

You are here. You are anywhere. Start with a single scene, a single memory, a single question. Set a timer and keep writing for twenty minutes. Whatever you have done at the end of that time, your page is no longer blank, and you have, beautifully, gloriously, begun.

Doorway: Primordial Slush 

The Matter from Which All Life Is Created

What I have come to understand is that you can’t start where you intend to end up (i.e., a book that feels like a book) because you have to start three billion years before that. I’m writing fast, following curiosity and questions, writing scenes even if I have no idea where they’re going, writing backstory for characters so I can figure out who everyone is, writing place and space. Eventually you want a book-shaped thing, but before that it takes the shape of a freshly bloomed tulip, the back half of a rhinoceros, a mountain stream, a bird’s nest. And before that it’s a beam of light or a ball of clay. I remember a friend asking how my second novel was going and I said, “It’s a swamp monster that oozes around on the floor waiting for me to feed it dead fishes? Is that an answer?”

This was not the creature I wanted. I wanted a unicorn or at least a sturdy, faithful dog. But here is what I now understand: You don’t get a dog right away, you have to evolve there. You have to start with a vat of primordial slush, the making of all life, and that slush is not pretty or decipherable. Then something crawls out and maybe it’s a tiny little swamp monster. You need that guy. Yes, that draft is super drooly and it’s awkward and lumpy and leaves mud all over the place. The swamp monster will grow arms and legs. When you come back to the second draft, he’ll be sitting up at a table and you can tie a little checked napkin around his neck and feed him crème brûlée. And when you loop back for a third draft, he’ll have grown a lovely coat of fur and now he’s looking more like a recognizable animal. A yak, maybe, or one of those Scottish Highland cows with the long red bangs. In draft four you have an apple tree that’s about to bloom and in draft six you have a crescent moon and in draft eight you have a wolf and in draft ten you can start to tuck all these eras carefully together between covers and hand it to someone and when they read it, by magic (and months or years of work), the story that you saw in your mind pops open in the mind of that reader and that’s when you get to start calling it a book, but by then I hope you trust that it’s also still a yak and still a moon, and that your old sloshy swamp guy is in there covered in primordial soup—the energy and possibility of the entire universe dripping from his slimy, squiggly body.

What I’m trying to tell you is that it’s going to be so much messier than you can possibly believe. Our job is to trust the mess. To trust the dust storms and the mud bogs and not rush on toward premature order. Order only matters if it contains something real. Sure, you can write a novel that follows a set of very clear rules and expectations, but you will have written a container, not contents. You will have a harness but no dog. Don’t skip the mess, because that’s where the magic lives.

It’s going to be so much messier than you can possibly believe. Our job is to trust the mess.

Do you hear that this is not a quality assessment? Yes, a first draft can be shitty, but it’s hard to get very excited about sitting down to write a shitty first draft when quality control is already in the room.

There’s a dude in a white coat with a hairnet and a magnifying glass and he’s waiting for me to hurry up and take my failures and turn them into candy apples he can sell. If I’m trying to make candy apples, then a beehive is a failure. If I’m trying to write a novel, then a mud bog is a failure. And even if we are welcoming of failure, as we should be, as it is critical to be, I’m sorry but I’m kicking that white coat guy out the fire escape. There is no quality assessment in the primordial slush draft. The universe did not feel inadequate when all it had was an explosion in space from which all life would emerge.

Key

This is not a key you turn once. As you move through your first draft, you must keep going through this door-way over and over. Write the following on a sticky note and put it on your wall: It’s not supposed to make sense yet.

You might live in the slush for weeks or months or even years. When life begins to crawl out onto land it could happen quickly, a sudden understanding of your project and what it wants to become. Or it might happen slowly, one little toe out in the sunshine, then back underwater.

This is about the intentional, heartfelt creation of energetic, weird, unformed life. Every writer you’ve ever admired lives here too.

It’s not supposed to make sense yet. It’s not supposed to be a book yet. I am discovering something still unknown on this earth. Create energy. Repeat.

Doorway: Writer Physics 

Follow the Energy

A story or a poem or an essay has logic, but it’s also a living thing. Imagine that a cat walks softly across the black landscape of a burned neighborhood. One valid approach might be to follow the logic: How did this fire start? Who or what was lost? What will happen to the people who used to live here? Those are good questions and you may answer them, but sometimes logic can sideline us on a kind of frontage road next to the story that never seems to merge into the real stuff of it.

Writer physics, which happily does not require a familiarity with the theory of relativity, is the practice of noticing and following the energy in your pages. That cat moves over the ground, and the ground is radiating with everything that was burned. The ash is full of the energetic force of the house, which was full of the energetic force of the ten years (let’s say) a family lived inside that space. The baby who was born on the kitchen floor after a labor too quick to get to the hospital; the photo album of great-grandparents in Hungary; a hundred dinners eaten on a simple plate, a shard of which is under one of the cat’s paws.

What happens when the family pulls up in a car in front of this changed place? Follow the energy between the people and the plate shards, the memories, the cat. Maybe the cat, afraid and traumatized, jumps at one of the children and scratches her, and the cut gets infected by something in the ash. Maybe the father becomes obsessed with rebuilding a certain room in the house exactly as it was. Maybe the mother returns in secret alone at night and digs through the rubble herself, looking for remains of her old life. Maybe there’s a coyote, also scavenging. All of these ideas grow from pressing together two sources of energy: a character and an object, a feeling and another feeling, a character and a tiny moment, a tiny moment and an object. Energy makes energy. Pretty soon that mother is running after the coyote, which has the cat in its jaws. Pretty soon, she’s got a jagged piece of wood, once part of her living room wall. Where does the energy go next?

Key

Take a survey of the energetic forces moving through a scene, image, or moment. Close your eyes and try to feel them swirling around. Pick two and press them together, see what happens when the energy of one thing mixes with the energy of another. What changes? What new force is born?

Now you have the keys to some of these doors, but where you go will be a place entirely undiscovered, all your own. Send me a postcard when you get there.

Excerpted from Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page by Ramona Ausubel. Copyright © 2026 by Ramona Ausubel. Published with permission from Tin House, an imprint of Zando, LLC. 

8 Books About Characters Seeking Community and Connection

Posted on by EL Assistant2

As a child growing up in a very small town, interlibrary loan was a lifeline. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, ILL books came by mail, in heavy canvas envelopes with a thick zipper meant to withstand handling by the postal service. The return slip was tucked inside, and it was all very magical to me: putting in a request at the small, regional library (we were lucky to have one, I realize now), and then books appearing in the PO Box, with the checkout stamps spanning the state and sometimes the nation. 

The Last Supper bookcover

Then, I didn’t have the language to describe what I was feeling: the remoteness and separation from the larger world; the way that anyone who left and stayed away was otherized—as if wanting to get away from a county with a high teen pregnancy rate and a low per capita income was the fault of the leaver; the sense of tension that is often present in rural areas, in that the pastoral beauty is a scrim over a hard way of living. Books fulfilled a desire for connection with the larger world, and often helped articulate another tension: the push and pull between isolation and community. 

My fifth book, The Last Supper, looks at these themes I’m perennially obsessed with—the impact of loneliness and seclusion, the human need for companionship, the necessity of finding people with whom we have commonality—and views them through the lens of my protagonist Amanda, a mother of two young children who is searching for more creative and economic agency in her life. It’s a novel for anyone who cares about how we build relationships and the ways that expectations around how family structures are “supposed” to work often impede our own happiness. 

In the spirit of looking for and finding community, here are eight books that examine this idea from different perspectives. Whether that is tight-knit friend groups who weather changes in life or themes of reconciling with the dead, the books on this list illustrate the complexity of finding our place in the world, all while showing that it really is possible.

The In-Betweens by Davon Loeb

In this memoir, Loeb writes about growing up biracial, with Black family roots in Alabama and white Jewish family roots in Long Island. Growing up Black and Jewish in the predominantly white suburbs of New Jersey engenders a sense of outsiderness in Loeb. He has a complicated relationship to family and race. Yet, he also writes of finding one’s way through first loves, early jobs, and a network of collaborators—the experiences and people who shape our lives. Some memoirs tell. Others explain. Loeb is the latter, illuminated. 

Ideas of Heaven by Joan Silber 

A penultimate chronicle of life, Silber’s Ideas of Heaven beautifully deploys hindsight, and each of these linked stories speaks to the power of connection. There’s a religious undercurrent in this book, written more as a way to link communities than to lionize any particular faith. Silber writes equally as well about fitting together as she does about being in opposition, because her stories center people, showing how far we will go for those we love.

White Horse by Erika T. Wurth 

This Indigenous horror novel follows Kari, who finds a connection to her mother’s ghost through an old family bracelet and is subsequently haunted by visions of people who have passed over, along with even more terrifying specters. At its heart, however, White Horse is about relationships, reconciling with family, the impact of chosen family, and the wide constellation of what community can mean: Sometimes it’s the drinking crew at a bar, sometimes it’s tribal aunties, but it’s always critical. 

These Impossible Things by Salma El-Wardany 

Centering on female friendships, These Impossible Things shows how deep bonds can be compromised, and how growing up and growing older can contextually change how we feel about the people we used to always reach out to first. It follows three Muslim women who met at school and are now living in London, figuring out their paths. Sometimes their choices strain the friendship, and there is constant tension between cultural expectations and being a 20-something in the city. This book addresses serious topics, but it also has a lightness to it, and it’s deeply relatable to anyone who has had decade-spanning friendships.

Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen 

This is a book that could have just as easily been called a speculative memoir as a novel. Jen writes toward an understanding of a fraught relationship with the narrator’s mother, who speaks from beyond the grave; and the narrator begins to understand how her mother was trapped between cultures, carried deep trauma, and was often misunderstood. It’s intimate and compulsively readable. Jen takes a complex family dynamic, transforms it into an intergenerational saga, distills it back into a love letter, and in doing so, forges a new bond.

Hello Wife by Lisa K Friedman

Set squarely at the intersection of middle-age regret and the American opioid crises, the setup alone of Hello Wife is poised to create tension. When Charlotte gets engaged to Jimbo, an unemployed addict she met at 7-Eleven, she’s 49 years old and ready for love. Charlotte’s family doesn’t agree that this is the way to do it. Yet, while it becomes quite clear and quite quickly that this is not a redemption story, the longing for companionship is palpable. Written with a delightful wryness.

Clutch by Emily Nemens

Clutch (which I have written about before) follows a group of five tight-knit friends, all turning 40. In writing everything from fertility treatments, looming divorces, political ambitions, tech bros, and addiction, Nemens imbues the quintet with side-alliances and a certain kind of girl-drama. Yet, even when there is conflict, sisterhood always encircles the women. It’s a satisfying, juicy-plot read with an unbreakable bond at the core. 

Nadezhda in the Dark by Yelena Moskovich 

Partners living in Berlin after having fled the Soviet Union as children—one from Ukraine and one from Russia—are in their apartment, not speaking on a long night. In this narrative in verse, there’s a sense of rootlessness for both women. Between Nadezhda and her unnamed partner, history surfaces and hurt surfaces. Both women process what it means to have lost a homeland. The narrator tries to understand what it means to love Nadezhda. As a writer, Moskovich places that ache the most, and she does it without apology and with a present lyricism that often leads her characters to a place of agency. 

A Snow Globe Theory of the Short Story

Posted on by EL Assistant2

I met Nora Lange in the dream space of the Brown Creative Writing MFA Program where I was teaching and she was a graduate student. As a student, she seemed all possibility, all wonder, and I, the witness to that nascent, vulnerable state of becoming. There was an openness, a tenderness and hope, an optimism, an irreverence, a crazy faith. I loved her quiet audacity, her willingness to fail when need be, her tolerance for the unknown, her acute take on all that surrounded her. Nora had a great spirit and an enormous verve—the quality that is immediately recognizable in those students who are up for anything.

Amazon.com: Day Care: Stories: 9781953387578: Lange, Nora: Books

The anything in those days was weekly or bi-monthly writing assignments conducted in the experimental narrative laboratory being run under the guise of a writing workshop. Nora recently reminded me of one of the things her cohort was up to at the time: They had been asked to create a Cornell box in which the page itself would serve as the box or the container and the task would be to place within this box disparate, trembling, precious images and narratives that might speak to each other and resonate in mysterious ways. The anything might be to create in language a vestibule that would then open onto an enormous concert hall; the anything might be to conjure a “Tristan chord” filled with longing and dissonance that, over pages, might move toward a kind of resolution. Or to create a truly bifurcated piece, or an oracular piece, or à la Georges Perec, attempt to exhaust a space in Providence . . .

Years pass of course. Students come and go, the so-called real world imposes its directives and preferences, and somewhere along the way too often a tacit agreement is entered, understandably so perhaps, an acquiesce, a surrender where essentially the same literary formulas, dressed albeit in cool clothing, are reinforced and prevail.

Nora does not succumb to the borrowed, the inherited, the familiar tropes, the conventionally legible expectations. More and more she grows incandescent, fierce, her work unique, the stories a series of intensities before us. Unapologetically, she steps into her talent. Her new collection of stories, Day Care, is an extraordinary record of our moment—of what it is like right here, right now. She asks of the page what far too few writers ask, and she ventures far—passionate, restless, full of wonder, not already decided, alive.

Recently after many years Nora and I found one another again and wrote back and forth for a few weeks before conducting this interview online from our far flung perches in the country. Oddly, though it had been more than a while, and much had transpired for both of us, it felt as if no time had passed at all.

Carole Maso: These stories are astonishing in many ways—they are what I admire most in writing, an event and not just the record of an event; they are a genuine experience on the page. What informs your work? What are your influences?

Nora Lange: I’m influenced by curiosity. I am influenced constantly. I can barely read or see anything without wanting to make notes. I have piles of magazines, cutouts, emails, saved drafts, notebooks, passages underlined. My dreamworld consists of a ceiling made of glass, definitely impractical (this is a dream world!), sleeping surrounded by books, and absorbing what I do not have the time to absorb under ordinary circumstances through osmosis. I work for my family at times—working harvest, or selling wine. For instance, mid-book tour, I’ll be in Charleston, South Carolina working an event called “Pinot in the City.” Often I’m asked at these events, red or white? To which I dutifully answer: Both. 

My influences are vast. You, Carole, for one. Anne Carson until I return to water. Muriel Spark. Lucia Berlin. Lydia Davis. Claudia Rankine. Maggie Nelson. Adrienne Rich. I realize it might be annoying to say, but I am grateful and loving for so many writers and their work. And I write beside them. I live beside them. 

CM: I very much like your stories because they reside in a slightly more abstract and heightened space and are not prone to the usual and often far more facile psychological assignment and expectation novels seem susceptible to. Can you talk about the different forms for you? What draws you to each? What do you hope/want from them formally? What do you think a story might do or might be?

A story is a problem to view, or a puzzle to sit with and try to put together, though you’re surely missing pieces.

NL: Someone for Publisher’s Weekly wrote, “Lange’s well-honed stories build to stinging epiphanies,” and, not to be so intellectually vanquished as to lean on the review, but that sounds about right. The hope is to build to some kind of release. 

For me, a story feels closer to my life. Active psychosis meets regular therapy, a luxury I do not have, so I write with language to discover. Sometimes I just get brushed with a line. I have many emails to myself with one liners and reminders to build on these or consult later. For instance, one recent Saturday while walking on the treadmill at my daughter’s daycare, I wrote an entire story on my cell phone inspired by a woman—sassing to an alarm—next to me on the stair master. It was a challenge to type as fast as my mind was bending. This is not to say the story is complete. No way. But some part of that experience, and of the text that was written that day, will be folded into a story that I’d like to orchestrate around a kind of alternative self-help group. 

Sometimes (often, I should admit) a story is a problem to view, or a puzzle to sit with and to try to put together (though you’re surely missing pieces!). I have no interest in solving anything. Stories feel alive in a different way than a novel. They have a different pulse. They are bursts and composites and have some constraints (like word count). They are contained in a different way than a novel, which has a different, roomier, perhaps more flexible architecture where, even as the writer, I am allowed to get lost.

I feel the need for a story to be perfect. That’s why, for me, they are incredibly time consuming. It’s like a carving. Or maybe it’s the way a photograph needs to come into focus—this is your shot. Which isn’t to suggest, not at all, that the entire image needs to be in focus. It could just be the daffodil teetering on a windowsill that is sharp while everything which surrounds it is not. 

I can say that with each story I am setting out to explore something in particular. For example, in “Owls Yawn Too,” the mother is absolutely in love with her owl, a kind of rapturous love. Very romantic. Or in “Dog Star,” I wanted to write a story that took place inside a snow globe—how would that work? Which I guess could sound “surreal,” as some pieces in the collection have been dubbed, but living inside a snow globe doesn’t really feel off the mark: People and industries interfere, or intrude upon the ways of life of others all the time. “World building,” such as a lifestyle or data collection center—these have interiors and exteriors in sometimes abstract, “sophisticated” ways, like governmental policy or mining. Or direct, smaller ways like the leaf-blower next door. Now, looking at that language above, I ask myself: How do I say this? How do I say what I want to say? I shall try again, but if this were a story, I would have deleted the former. Whereas here, I’ll leave it be, an experiment. What I mean to write is there are effects of industry and policy that we do not see, which isn’t to say we do not experience them. We do, absolutely. But they are an altogether different kind of imposition, one where most individuals wield little to zero power. As opposed to a smaller, more direct “intrusion,” or interruption (less severe) like a Jehovah’s Witness ringing your bell. 

CM: In this collection there’s an exploration of sentiments, sciences, human dynamics, which is to say animal dynamics. How does language reside in you? 

NL: I just found at the back of my desk, as I sat down to write to you, a slim slip of paper about the size of my ring finger with the handwritten words: 

Patterns of behavior

Alimental, gametic, climactic 

And off to the left, written in a pyramid shape: Causes of migration. 

When we talk about survival we cannot leave out its twin: death.

This is my handwriting. This snippet of paper, with this text, came from my time living in Chicago for years in the ‘00s. I had done a play (written and directed) called Aviary based on the migrational patterns of birds and captivity and other undergraduate musings! The point is, I have carried this snippet of text with me for all these years—and I have moved a lot. I mention this, not only because of the serenity of finding it as I was sitting down to write to you, but because these are the themes that I find myself returning to: a longing for air, preferably fresh, and survival of any sort. 

CM: I feel a hedge against death, a fending off, honoring and bringing up close the chaotic and the dread, perhaps to disarm death in some way. Can you talk about death (in any way you like)?

NL: Odd you ask, as I’ve just completed an ongoing interview with palliative care neurologist and writer Anna DeForest for a column she’s doing in The Believer on this subject. 

I could spend my whole life talking about death, I came to realize in corresponding with Anna. I am realizing now that perhaps I have been doing this from the start without knowing. When we talk about survival we cannot leave out its twin: death. For many, these are the counterpoints which make up life. That is, living it. I am not talking about dying in old age—or surviving elderly existence—but of migration, even the day to day, for many. My mother lived from paycheck to paycheck, and survival was about having just enough. She “held it together” until she didn’t. The force, the weight of getting by, for so many is often alarming. A detail about my childhood, and my life with my mother and brother—which I absolutely understand, though I wish had been different for her—was that soon after divorcing, she remarried. Maybe it was for love. I’d wager it also had something to do with finding support. Working full-time and raising two very young children alone, in a new city, family dead, or far away, can be daunting. I highlight this as a way to illustrate the complexity of a woman’s choice. 

CM: I’m left with the feeling of a world as it vanishes, and so all is heightened and precious in a way not often felt in fiction. Sometimes, as I mentioned, it feels as if it vanishes as we read. The cherished but lost world, or about to be lost, or, if in a precarious present, there’s a tenacity, a holding on as all blurs and dissolves. On this note, the book feels very much a picture of cherished things. As it all disappears, goes to smoke now, what did you think was beautiful there? 

NL: I think to be touched by things is beautiful. Sometimes we—myself and Sylvia (my daughter who is three and a half)—just pull up the heavy black blinds in our rental to watch and discuss the squirrels scurrying along the electrical wires. She will call out to me from the living room to come to see the moon, which after the daylight savings time change is a night-like moon at seven a.m. 

Beauty is to stop and marvel, to be touched. I believe to allow yourself to be touched is radical. I hope that these stories cause people to stop to marvel for a minute, or to meditate on cherished things. But the book will not disappear. Unless of course there’s a flood, or an earthquake, which might prompt any number of things. Perhaps even a divorce in which one partner gets it in the settlement. 

CM: Also conveyed is the mystery of existence, the baffling project of being alive. You create subterranean, complicated responses in the reader that only literature can do. Can you talk about how you move through the world? What is your day-to-day like? What makes its mark on you? 

NL: Interacting makes marks for me. That can happen in reading. I interact while reading, do you? It could be that I stop to look a word up, or write a note or something in the margins, or “JUST THINK.” 

My day-to-day is extraordinarily unglamorous. It involves a lot of discussions with a toddler, who calls herself “kitty cat” and “buttercuppy” and “Jew.” She might be all these things. I have a limited concept of my origins. Recently, under the guise of research for a character that I’m writing, I did the Ancestry thing—spat in a vial and sent it off for DNA testing, which hasn’t shed any light on anything. 

Beauty is to stop and marvel, to be touched. I believe to allow yourself to be touched is radical.

The other evening we passed out fliers around our neighborhood. Posters is probably more accurate. I had written on them: Dear Neighbors! And I was pointing out to Sylvia that the neigh in the word was the sound that a horse supposedly makes. It’s also a word, neighbors, that I notoriously misspell. That evening, even when I’d felt confident I’d spelled it correctly, after the third or so poster spelling it out, I still had to confirm. Self-doubt is all consuming. I work really hard to reject it, if I can. If I’m able. I really do believe that those who want more power, those who have all the power and want more power, want to erode our memory, our sense of self. Therefore, I feel a constant need to legitimize my understanding—even researched—and my intuition—less researched though often accurate. Like when I was in labor but nobody believed me until the baby was nearly on the floor. Or when my water broke and I was asked if I had simply peed my pants when I’d said so. If a person is exposed to enough of that questioning, to that implicit or explicit doubt directed by others, how is one supposed to touch base with themselves? 

CM: Mother runs through many of your stories. Or a mother force field, a mother-feeling insinuates itself often into the prose, even when it remains outside the story’s parameters. What is your experience of motherhood? What windows has the experience of being a mother opened or closed?

NL: Chimera—as the word relates to Greek mythology—generally speaking, a female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. Can birth be so wild an animal that it’s transhuman? 

More calmly, motherhood is time travel. That is how I see it, in all seriousness. On a cellular level and more. I feel very much a part of the circular atmosphere, more now than ever before. On motherhood time travel: I am to write about this very topic soon. Stay-tuned. 

CM: Perhaps a simple question to end on, but Nora—what brings you to the page? 

NL: A deep longing to be there, wherever “there” is at any given moment in time: seated on an airplane; reminding Sylvia to (please) not throw sand in a playground’s sandbox; in a grocery store checkout line; horizontal at rest listening to her breathing beside me. 

An obsession. Raging curiosity. A resolve to participate no matter what angles or forces wish to take me away. Writing is an act of engagement, and I would not know how or what to be without it.